A letter to the Bozeman city attorney

This entry is part 2 of 18 in the series Bozeman Privacy Fiasco

I e-mailed this to city attor­ney Greg Sullivan a few min­utes ago. I post it here in the hopes that oth­ers will send sim­i­lar e-mails ques­tion­ing the City of Bozeman’s pol­icy of ask­ing for social net­work­ing pass­words on a waiver for city job appli­cants’ crim­i­nal back­ground checks. I also sent it to the local news­pa­per and tele­vi­sion station.

Mr. Sullivan,

I watched the KBZK news story about the city’s hir­ing prac­tices, espe­cially the crim­i­nal back­ground check. I’m con­cerned that ask­ing poten­tial employ­ees for their Web pass­words and user­names is an ille­gal vio­la­tion of pri­vacy, and I hope you’ll answer a few ques­tions about the policy.

  1. When was the pol­icy enacted? In other words, exactly when did the city begin ask­ing poten­tial employ­ees for their passwords?
  2. Do all poten­tial employ­ees fill out the crim­i­nal back­ground check waiver, or only employ­ees who have been pro­vi­sion­ally offered a job?
  3. If all employ­ees must fill out the back­ground check waiver, then what hap­pens to the paper­work for the appli­cants who later do not become city employ­ees? That is to say, how many peo­ple have given the city their account names and pass­words who did not later get a job with the city? Are their records pro­tected in secure files, as you say the city employ­ees’ records are? Are they shred­ded, burned, oth­er­wise destroyed?
  4. What impact does it have on a person’s chances of obtain­ing a city job if that per­son refuses to fill out that por­tion of the back­ground check waiver, cit­ing pri­vacy prin­ci­ples? Must a poten­tial employee fill that sec­tion out in order to be con­sid­ered for employment?
  5. What hap­pens if it is dis­cov­ered that a per­son lied on that appli­ca­tion and listed no Web accounts when, in real­ity, that per­son had accounts?
  6. For the peo­ple hired to the city before this became a pol­icy: If those peo­ple have Facebook accounts or other sim­i­lar Web ser­vice accounts, have they been asked to sub­mit their pass­words and user­names to the city to keep on file? Or are those peo­ple per­mit­ted to have social media accounts with­out city oversight?
  7. Exactly who gets to see an applicant’s pri­vate Web data? Names and titles would be nice to have.
  8. Explain how it can pos­si­bly be fair for a per­son to place trust in city employ­ees and give pass­words to their per­sonal Web accounts when the appli­cant is clearly not trusted to be an adult on those sites? In other words, what makes the city employ­ees fair judges of accept­able behav­ior on social net­work­ing sites?
  9. Have city employ­ees been trained in pri­vacy mat­ters and sen­si­tiv­ity issues when it comes to social net­work­ing sites? If train­ing has been done, who did the train­ing, and exactly which city employ­ees received that train­ing. How much did any such train­ing cost the city?
  10. Have city employ­ees been trained to nav­i­gate and use every sin­gle social net­work­ing site that an appli­cant could list on that waiver, or will the employ­ees be bum­bling around in sites they have never heard of before?
  11. How much time does a city employee on a hir­ing com­mit­tee spend on each social net­work­ing site listed by the appli­cant? Hours? Minutes?
  12. Is pro­vid­ing such infor­ma­tion on the waiver required?
  13. As the KBZK reporter pointed out to you, the state con­sti­tu­tion grants Montanans a right to pri­vacy unless the state can show a com­pelling inter­est to over­come that right. Please explain why this pol­icy con­sti­tutes a “com­pelling state interest.”
  14. Finally, you said sev­eral times in the KBZK inter­view that the city looks for “very spe­cific infor­ma­tion” (you used that word­ing twice) about appli­cants. Please list the spe­cific things you look for on those sites. If you have a rubric for deter­min­ing a person’s trust­wor­thi­ness, moral char­ac­ter or oth­er­wise accept­abil­ity, please attach it to your response.

As a con­cerned cit­i­zen of Bozeman, I hope that you’ll take the time to respond to each of these ques­tions and attach any rel­e­vant links, memos, or legal doc­u­ments explain­ing this policy.

–Michael Becker

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This entry was posted in Ethics, Social Networking and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
  • I would be VERY surprised if you get a response, especially because they're all intelligent questions where the only answers would point out a clear strike against the policy in first place. Awesome letter, though.

    Apparently Facebook themselves have been made aware of this and have also issued a statement. From "TheRegister":
    Facebook is not pleased with Bozeman situation and plans to contact the City. "This is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which received feedback from users and was ultimately approved in a site-wide vote," the company tells us. "Our policies prohibit those who use the service from soliciting login information or accessing an account that belongs to someone else. In addition to violating Facebook’s policies, we think this practice violates personal privacy, and we plan to reach out to the City of Bozeman to discuss it with them."

    (link to article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/18/american_... )
  • Seth
    What about: Could all this fuss have been avoided with a few minutes of reflection on the subject? I'm sure there was a dialog at some point on the merits of this policy. I like to hope there was, anyway. No one saw this coming? Really? Yikes.
  • Another thing I'd like addressed is the fact that releasing your Facebook and MySpace passwords to third parties is a violation of those sites' terms of service -- and probably a violation of other sites' terms as well. So by bowing to the city's request for information, you're putting the very account they want to scope out in danger of being deleted.
  • [polldaddy 1717117 http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1717117/ polldaddy]
  • I think you did a good job of summing up the questions that are on everyone's mind. I hope that Mr. Sullivan responds.
  • russ
    Well said. I will send a similar email.
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